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Thousands flee as jihadists seize Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city

Suadad al-Salhy

Iraqis fleeing the violence in Mosul wait in their vehicles at a checkpoint run by Kurdish forces. Photo: AFP

Baghdad: Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has urged his parliament to declare a nationwide state of emergency after militants from an al-Qaeda offshoot seized control of a large swath of Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, in a humiliating sequence of events that saw Iraq's US-trained security forces abandon their posts and weapons and flee.

Having consolidated control over Sunni-dominated Nineveh province, armed gunmen were heading on the main road to Baghdad, Iraqi officials said. Thousands of civilians fled south toward Baghdad and east toward the autonomous region of Kurdistan, where security is maintained by a Kurdish army, the peshmerga.

Kurdish officials in nearby Erbil said hundreds of thousands of people were expected to flee into that area and that the Kurdistan Regional Government, a semi-autonomous body that administers the ethnic Kurd enclave, had mobilised its security forces for fighting with militants along Iraq's major highway linking Mosul to the south.

Children stand next to a burnt-out car during clashes between Iraqi forces and insurgents in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Photo: Reuters

The Iraqi army apparently crumbled in the face of the militant assault, as soldiers dropped their weapons, shed their uniforms for civilian clothes and blended in with the fleeing masses.

Witnesses' accounts said insurgents belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) had taken control of military bases, government offices and television stations and had released thousands of prisoners from local jails. There were reports that the group also had captured Iraqi assault helicopters, though that wasn't immediately confirmed.

Iraqi families fleeing the fighting in Mosul gather at a checkpoint run by Kurdish forces. Photo: AFP

If the capture of Mosul - a city of 2 million people - stands, ISIL would become unquestionably the most significant jihadist organisation in the world, eclipsing al-Qaeda, to which ISIL once pledged allegiance but that in recent months has become its bitter rival.

"Where has any other jihadi group achieved this level of success in terms of territorial control and the workings of an actual state?" asked Aymenn al-Tamimi, an analyst of Syrian and Iraqi extremist groups for the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum.

Mr Tamimi said it was now clear that ISIL could no longer could be considered merely an insurgent group, but a state of its own, with police forces, Islamic court systems and the ability to provide services such as electricity and rubbish collection.

A security guard from Kurdish forces frisks a man fleeing the violence in Mosul. Photo: AFP

"They took control of everything, and they are everywhere," said one soldier who fled the city, and gave only his first name, Haidar.

The swift capture of large areas of the city by militants aligned with ISIL represented a climactic moment on a long trajectory of Iraq's unraveling since the withdrawal of US forces at the end of 2011.

Mr Maliki called on friendly governments for help, without mentioning the United States specifically.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that the United States was "deeply concerned about the events that have transpired in Mosul" and that the Obama administration supported a "strong, coordinated response to push back this aggression".

The statement said the administration would provide "all appropriate assistance to the government of Iraq" but didn't specify what such emergency aid would entail.

Even as insurgents consolidated control of Mosul and surrounding Nineveh province on Tuesday, they looked to other targets. They cut off a portion of the main highway that links the city with Baghdad, the capital, and secured villages near Kirkuk, a major city that is in dispute between Arabs and Kurds, according to security officials.

For more than six months, the militants have maintained control of Fallujah, in Iraq's Sunni-majority Anbar province, a city where hundreds of Americans died trying to crush an insurgency. The seizure of Mosul, a city of 1.4 million with a mix of ethnicities, sects and religions, is more ominous for the stability of Iraq.

"It's a shock," said James Jeffrey, a former US ambassador to Iraq. "It's far more serious than Fallujah."

Mosul is a transportation hub for goods coming from Turkey and elsewhere. An important oil pipeline is nearby, carrying nearly 15 per cent of the country's oil flow to a port on the Turkish coast.

The chaos in Mosul also illustrated how the violence in Iraq has increasingly merged with the civil war in Syria, as extremists now operate on both sides of the porous border. On Tuesday, local officials claimed that many of the fighters were jihadists who had come from the lawless frontier that divides the two countries, where militants have increasingly operated with impunity even as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has reclaimed ground lost to the insurgents elsewhere.

ISIL is also besieging the Syrian cities of Deir al-Zor and al-Bukamal, which controls large oil fields as well as a border crossing to Iraq's Anbar province. Those areas currently are controlled by al-Qaeda's official franchise in Syria, the Nusra Front, which has been an odds with ISIL over leadership for the past year.

Mr Tamimi said ISIL's victory in Mosul was likely to persuade tribes in Syria, and perhaps even some Nusra commanders, that an ISIL win was inevitable in Deir al-Zor.

Osama al-Nujaifi, the Iraqi Parliament speaker and a leading Sunni politician from Mosul, called the fighting a "foreign invasion of Iraq, carried out by terrorist groups from different countries".

The rout in Mosul was a humiliating defeat for Iraq's security forces, equipped and trained by the US at a cost of billions of dollars. As the insurgency has gained strength over the last year, Mr Maliki's Shiite-dominated government has been criticised for pursuing security policies that alienated ordinary Sunnis, such as sweeps that rounded up hundreds of men, innocent and guilty alike, and the arrest of the wives of suspected militants.

Referring to the security forces in Mosul, Mr Jeffrey said: "They had lost the support of the people because they had a sectarian policy, and I saw it with my own eyes."

Highlighting the gravity of the situation, some of Iraq's Shiite religious authorities in the holy city of Najaf issued statements on Tuesday in support of the army, which is dominated by Shiites. A representative in Najaf for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, went further, urging Shiites to join the security forces.

Ayham Kamel, director of the Middle East and North Africa for the Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm in Washington, said in an assessment emailed to clients that the militant group would "use cash reserves from Mosul's banks, military equipment from seized military and police bases and the release of 2500 fighters from local jails to bolster its military and financial capability".

For Mr Maliki, the violence in Mosul represents a significant political challenge as he tries to secure a third term as prime minister. His coalition won the most seats in parliament in national elections in April, but not a majority, and he has been negotiating with other factions to form a new government.

The Mosul assault came in a week when al-Maliki's government has been trying to beat back a surging militant offensive concentrated in central and northern Iraq. In the cities of Samarra and Ramadi the militants have stormed police stations, government offices and even a university. On Saturday, car bombs killed scores of people across Baghdad in one of the deadliest coordinated attacks in weeks.

After militants captured Fallujah at the end of last year, the United States rushed guns, ammunition and Hellfire missiles to Iraq, but those seemed to make little difference. In some cases, the weapons were captured by insurgents in Anbar, and on Tuesday it appeared that more US equipment had fallen into the hands of the militants, including American-made Humvees.

By nightfall on Tuesday, the city was calm, residents said, but there was no electricity, water supplies were running low and there was little fuel to run generators. The bodies of militants had been taken away for burial, but the corpses of security forces still lay in the streets.

Zaid Mohammed, 27, a teacher in Mosul, said the militants, speaking in what he called "Mosul village" accents, used loudspeakers to tell soldiers that they'd be safe if they laid down their weapons and deserted.

"Whoever this is doing the fighting is different from those we saw in 2005, 2006 and 2007," Mr Mohammed said. "Back then, they would kill soldiers whether they surrendered or not."

He said the militants also appeared to be taking pains to portray themselves to locals as their protectors, by opening roads to allow families to flee to the north and by assigning guards to banks, clinics and other public facilities in order to prevent the looting that has occurred in previous crises.

"They opened the roads, removed checkpoints and moved concrete slabs, and now the roads are open. Mosul is now like 2003; no more roadblocks," Mr Mohammed said. "They lifted the curfew, and after that so many families started to leave toward Kurdistan. People are leaving; they're afraid of the army randomly shelling Mosul like they do in Fallujah."